Weekly Report and Reflection Blog Post # 4: Bookmarking

Bookmarking sites on your computer is a very useful tool used by everyone, including university students. Having the ability to save a particular page on your computer that you can revisit over a period of time is very helpful when doing school projects or writing papers. However, it is easy for bookmarks to get lost, or unintentionally deleted from your internet tab. Speaking from experience, I recently updated the software on my Apple Macbook Pro, and when my computer restarted, I noticed that all my previous bookmarks were gone! This was a very frustrating time for me because I had important websites bookmarked on my computer from the previous 2 years of school. After loosing all these bookmarked tabs, I was in search of a solution to this problem. It wasn’t until this week’s session that I learned about a program called “Diigo

(Modern Science Education, 2015)

”.

Diigo is a system that allows you to bookmark tabs, highlight pages, make sticky notes on websites as well as create categories to organize your work. What makes this program so special and convenient is that it can be accessed at any time anywhere you go; either on a computer, tablet or smartphone. Through Diigo, you can build your personal library in the cloud, with links, pages, notes, pictures etc, never to be lost, and ready to be accessed anywhere. Of course, those digital highlights, sticky notes and screenshots you added while going around the web automatically go into your library. Once in your library, you can create categories to organize your findings. Upon exploring the functions of Diigo, I created several categories in my library such as News, Media, Freestyle Skiing and many more.

            Diigo is a system that will be helpful with my future at Brock University because I am not the most organized student. The internet is an essential and very crucial tool when it comes to doing school work, so having the ability to be organized is a must! With categories to put my findings in, I will be able to locate certain things at the click of a button. For example, if I am writing a large comparative paper, it may be beneficial to have a Diigo category for each topic so that I can easily flip back and forth between the two.

After exploring RSS feeds last week, it is important to note the significant difference between that and Diigo. Although both platforms act as an organization center for websites that you find interesting, they both do much different tasks. For example, an RSS feed will constantly give you updates with fresh new content that a website has to offer. Whereas a database such as Diigo will

only hold the website and content from when you saved it last. On the topic of RSS feeds, an article that I found interesting this week on my Feedly account was about a Brock University student who was named amongst the top 36 entrepreneurs in Canada. This article stood out to me on Feedly because in the small article box, I could recognize the student in the photo.

(LinkedIn, Curexe. 2015)

Johnathan Holland is a Brock student that came in and talked to my class last semester about a company he founded called Curexe. Curexe provides international payment and currency exchange services for its business clients. I would never have spotted this article if it wasn’t for RSS feeds and the use of Feedly.